The Great Unknown
It’s easy to think about why we fear the unknown. We’ve never experienced it, never felt it before, so of course, the possibility of that unknown being dangerous, painful, frightening, is present. But there also exists a possibility that the unknown is the opposite of all this. What if the unknown is beautiful, thrilling, exhilarating? Why do we tend to drape our negative experiences, our fears and anxieties over something not known? Why not look forward to it, instead of cringing away from it?
The best moments in my life have happened unexpectedly. An unexpected love, an unexpected passion, an unexpected journey. It is in the spontaneous folds of the fabric of our lives that we find the most joy, the most fulfillment. Perhaps one of human kind’s greatest flaws is expectation. Perhaps we are so focused on the minute matters, the trivialities, that we fail to see that this life we have been given is not promised. That, yes, perhaps the week ahead will be the same as usual. Wake up in the morning, go to work, come back, cook, eat, watch some television, repeat, until the weekend, in which we allow ourselves some pleasures until we do it all over again.
But life has a funny way of surprising us when we least expect it. Maybe it’s by us meeting someone out of the blue, maybe it’s with a new job opportunity, or maybe it’s the simple act of waking up one day, looking around and craving so much more. It was Jonathan Safran Foer who said “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living”. Maybe if we didn’t expect life to be so mundane and routine, that instead, we expected uncertainty, welcomed it even, there wouldn’t be so much fear around it. After all, the best memories, the best moments in life happen outside our comfort zones. So why not embrace that?
I believe in embracing life, embracing its many unknowns, however terrifying the concept may be. Because when we do this, when we are able to think and see and look beyond our little bubbles, our own lives, we can truly start to understand that the world around us is so much bigger, so much greater than we could have ever imagined. And that is the mark of growth, the first step toward a more fulfilled life. I have realized that the older I get, the more reading I do, the more traveling and learning, eating and connecting, that I do not know much at all. Because this world in all its grandeur and culture and vastness is so much bigger than I could ever begin to comprehend.
The many questions I have about it, the universe, the meaning of life continue to grow and expand upon one another until one thing sticks out. Uncertainty is a given. The great unknown is out there, just waiting for us to chase it, to throw ourselves into it, without fear. Because that is life’s greatest lesson. The humbling knowledge that our lives are geared toward trying to understand and make sense of things that just cannot be. And in this process, we learn to be kind to ourselves, to others because at the end of the day, we are all on this same strange, frightening journey together. We are all hurtling toward the vast unknown, and this will always make us so much more alike than we are different. The unknown is not something to be feared at all. It is meant to be embraced in all its complexities, just as we are meant to embrace each other.
